Recently in energy production Category

As our regular readers know, we here at TCLocal are engaged
in a long-term effort to help develop local responses to energy
descent—the condition of decreasingly available energy. The
near-term manifestation of energy descent is high liquid fuel
prices caused by a leveling and decline in global oil production,
and it has been part of our job over the five years since we
started TCLocal to keep an eye on the liquid fuel outlook and
periodically advise the residents of Tompkins County (in
particular, local policy makers) on what we’re finding.

In September, five of us TCLocal contributors had the honor of
presenting a panel discussion on “Local Responses to Energy
Descent” at the monthly meeting of Back to Democracy in
Trumansburg. The audience heard from Katie Quinn-Jacobs on
Preparedness; Karl North on Food Production; Bethany Schroeder on
Health Care; and Tom Shelley on Energy. Articles by all of these
authors can be found elsewhere on the TCLocal.org web site (see
the list at the end of this article). It was my job to introduce
these responses to energy descent with a quick summary of the
outlook for liquid fuels. A version of that introductory
presentation serves as our TCLocal article for the months of
September and October.

The overview that follows was based on a fresh analysis of the
current situation conducted over the summer by a team consisting
of myself, Bethany Schroeder, Karl North, and Tom Shelley. Not
every detail will be agreed upon by every TCLocal contributor or
even by every member of the research team, but it does represent
in a general way a shared view of the outlook for liquid fuels
over the next decade. Illustrations drawn from the Web
are credited where the source is known and are reproduced here
under the Fair Use provisions of copyright law.

The Lesson of Deepwater Horizon

Predicting the price of oil is an extraordinarily difficult
task even for petroleum experts, which we are not, and the effect
of the economic downturn on the oil business has made reliable
forecasting almost impossible for the last couple of years. But
this summer, one thing, at least, became very clear: the easy oil
is gone. That’s not a future development; it’s already here.

U.S. Coast Guard

No one pursues a course as risky, dangerous, and expensive as
drilling four miles down into the Gulf of Mexico unless all the
easier stuff is no longer available. It doesn’t take a degree in
petroleum engineering to see this.

It is enlightening to
understand some basic facts about oil extraction, though, so if
you’d like to know more about that,
click here. You’ll be returned back to
this place when you’re done.

Here’s a recently published official view of the future from
the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Information Agency
(EIA).

The top line in this remarkable graph is world demand for
liquid fuels. Over the long term it always increases
steadily due to population growth, if nothing else.

The colored areas show the global sources of liquid fuels,
taking into account all currently known projects. As the graph
makes clear, existing sources of conventional oil are already in
steep decline, and unconventional sources can’t keep up with
that decline. The result is a growing gap between supply and
demand beginning not long after 2012.

In the petroleum world, this has never happened before. Up
until now, there has always been enough liquid fuel to meet
demand, because it could be pumped out as fast as people had a use
for it. A widening gap between supply and demand will eventually
have an upward effect on prices beyond anything seen so far.

The label “Unidentified Projects” in the
illustration acknowledges that no one really knows what sources
can fill this widening gap between supply and demand. It is
certain that no combination of currently foreseeable efforts can
make up for the rate of decline in conventional oil production,
and any new projects are certain to be much more expensive than
those of the past.

Red Herrings and Dead Ends

At this point, most readers will be thinking of their favorite
solution to the energy problem. But within the ten-year period
that we’re discussing here, there is no solution. No
current proposal will avert a near-term future of decreasingly
less available liquid fuel.

This conclusion may come as a shock to anyone who’s put
their faith in technological fixes. We seem to have so many
promising solutions to choose from; you’d think the problem
was just getting them implemented. There certainly is a lot we
could be doing that we aren’t, but on examination it turns
out that the proposed technological solutions to the coming oil
crunch are at best wishful thinking and at worst border on the
fraudulent.

A prime example of this latter category is the idea that we
will replace current vehicles with ones fueled by hydrogen. The
fact is that hydrogen is not a source of energy, it’s just a
way of storing energy, like batteries. And if we had the extra
energy to store, we could distribute it much more easily by
building out the existing electric grid—and much more
efficiently, too. As shown here, the pure electric approach
delivers three times the power to the road from a given input of
electricity than the hydrogen-based approach.

Bossel, Proceedings of the IEEE

Remember GM’s relentless promotion of hydrogen cars? The
last serious publicity the company put into this was in 2006.
It’s now obvious that this was all just a PR campaign
designed to reassure consumers that GM was working toward a
transition away from fossil fuels. That role is now being played
by electric cars. This is an improvement, but unfortunately not a
solution.

The proposal to solve the liquid fuels problem by transitioning
to electricity is one of a large class of putative solutions that
make some technical sense but just don’t comprehend the
scale of the problem. It’s clear that widespread conversion
to electric vehicles will require some kind of addition to our
generating capacity, but few people appreciate the size of the
change. The fact is that most people have no idea how much energy
we’re consuming to move as many vehicles around as we
do.

Let’s do a little back-of-the-envelope calculation here.
According to the EIA, total U.S. petroleum consumption in 2007 was
20,680,000 barrels per day, and 70 percent of it went to
transportation. A barrel of oil represents 1700 kWh of energy.
Do the arithmetic and you’ll find that transportation in the
U.S. uses about 9.0 billion MWh/year of energy from petroleum. By
comparison, according to the EIA, total U.S. electrical output in
2007 was about 4.2 billion MWh. In other words, the amount of
energy represented by the fuel we’re using in vehicles is
more than twice as much as the total amount of energy represented
by the electricity we’re producing each year. Speaking very
roughly, therefore, a proposal to replace half of our vehicle
fleet with electric versions amounts to a proposal to double the
size of our entire electric generating and distribution system,
which includes doubling the amount of fuel consumed (chiefly
coal). It is safe to assume that we will not see this happening
in the next ten years, if ever.

Proposals that rely on solar, wind, or nuclear to provide the
missing electricity demonstrate a similar failure to understand
the scale of the problem. The following diagram illustrates this
point.

Count off the sources by working up from the bottom of the
graph and you’ll begin to understand what a tiny proportion
of our electrical generating capacity is due to wind, solar, and
biomass; their contribution is barely visible. Electricity from
nuclear is much greater, of course, but the cost and planning
horizon of nuclear projects means that any sizable expansion of
nuclear capacity would lie many years in the future. Aside from
the inability of these sources provide liquid fuel, no believable
expansion scenario envisions any combination of them being able to
fill more than a fraction of the energy gap that’s opening
up due to the decline of conventional oil.

A third class of solutions would actually solve the liquid
fuel problem, but only for a little while, and at an enormous cost
in other resources. Hydrofracking for natural gas in our local
Marcellus shale is an example of this category of solutions: we
get a temporary shot of fossil fuel at the cost of our farms and
our drinking water, and at the end of the process we're left back
where we started but with permanent damage to our environment.

Another technology in this category is oil from “tar
sands” and “oil shales,” production of which uses
phenomenally large amounts of water and is even more destructive
to the environment than hydrofracking.

Tar sands are also representative of a class of good-looking
production technologies that don’t yield significantly more
energy than they use but simply substitute one source of energy
for another, in this case, massive amounts of natural gas to heat
the “tar” (bitumen). Another example of an energy
“source” that doesn’t actually deliver
significantly more energy than it consumes is liquid fuel from
biomass, such as ethanol from corn.

To sum up, then: some of these alternatives—in
particular, the development of solar and wind power—really
are worth pursuing, but none of the current proposals can change
the history of the next decade or so, either because they are not
solutions at all or because it is physically impossible to
increase production from alternative sources quickly enough to
have a meaningful impact in that period of time. The only thing
that could change the basic reality would be a massive, all-out
effort to replace liquid fuels with substitutes from coal or
natural gas.

Large-scale production of liquid fuels from coal has only been
accomplished twice in history, once by the Nazi government in
Germany and once by the apartheid regime in South Africa; the
synthetic fuel is of excellent quality, but the technology is
brutally expensive and therefore instituted only as a last resort.
And of course large-scale coal-to-liquids would just delay the
inflection point without really changing anything, because coal
and natural gas are themselves finite resources that are closer to
their own peaks than most people realize.

Coal-to-liquids shares one more flaw with most of the other
proposed solutions: we’re out of time. A 2005 study
commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy concluded that
widespread disruption to our economic system from peak oil could
be averted by nothing less than a WW2-level national mobilization
effort to implement coal-to-liquids starting at least a
decade ahead of the peak—and we don’t have that kind
of time left.

Timing the Gap

The inevitability of a coming liquid fuel price crisis caused
by failure of oil production to meet increasing demand is much
easier to establish than the precise timing of that crisis. But
this year several independent studies have arrived from different
directions at approximately the same conclusion.

In “The Status of Conventional World Oil Reserves,”
published recently in the journal Energy Policy,
researchers Owen, Interwildi, and King conducted an in-depth
survey of all currently available information regarding oil
production and petroleum reserves, with special attention to the
reliability of reporting in the OPEC countries. Their
conclusion:

Supply and demand is likely to diverge between
2010 and 2015, unless demand falls in parallel with supply
constrained induced recession.

Note the “unless”; we’ll return to that
shortly.

In the article “Forecasting World Crude Oil Production
Using Multicyclic Hubbert Model,” published last April in
Energy & Fuels 2010, a team from Kuwait University
(Nashawi, Malallah, and Al-Bisharah) performed an in-depth
mathematical analysis of the 47 leading oil-producing countries.
While based on a methodology completely different from that used
by Interwildi et al., their findings are strikingly
similar:

World oil reserves are being depleted at an annual
rate of 2.1%.... World production is estimated to peak in
2014....

A third independent study is notable for its source: the United
States Joint Command (that is, the U.S. military establishment).
Their official public assessment of the current situation,
published last February in Joint Operating Environment
2010, is short on detail but very clear:

By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could
entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in
output could reach nearly 10 MBD.

Ten million barrels per day (MBD) is about 12 percent of
current global oil production. A shortfall of that magnitude
would have an effect on fuel prices that’s difficult to
fully imagine.

The mainstream business press has until recently been notably
dismissive of such estimates, regardless of the credibility of
their sources (how can you dismiss the entire U.S. military?).
But in September, Forbes, which bills itself as the
“capitalist tool,” broke the wall of denial in an
interview with respected oil analyst and oil industry veteran
Charles Maxwell (nicknamed “the Dean of Oil
Analysts”). Maxwell said:

A bind is clearly coming. We think that the peak in
production will actually occur in the period 2015 to 2020. And if
I had to pick a particular year, I might use 2017 or 2018. That
would suggest that around 2015, we will hit a near-plateau of
production around the world, and we will hold it for maybe
four or five years. On the other side of that plateau, production
will begin slowly moving down. By 2020, we should be headed in
a downward direction for oil output in the world each year
instead of an upward direction, as we are today.

As might be expected, the estimate in Forbes is the most
conservative of the forecasts quoted here, but even it clearly
sees a fundamental change in the liquid fuels supply before the
end of the decade.

These are just the most recent in a series of warnings by
eminently credible sources dating back to 2004. For some earlier
quotes, click
here.

Now let’s take another look at that first study. It says that
supply and demand are likely to diverge between 2010 and 2015,
unless demand falls in parallel with supply constrained induced
recession. In other words, this forecast, like the rest, is
based on the assumption that the economy stays healthy,
because (as just happened) an economic downturn reduces the demand
for liquid fuels. So we can sum up all four of these recent
analyses in one conclusion:

IF the economy stays healthy, THEN
supply shortages or very high prices will begin to develop before
the end of this decade, probably some time between 2012 and
2015.

In forecasting the timing, therefore, the operative question
is, How likely is it that the economy will stay healthy?
And the answer is, Not very. This is because fuel prices
and the economy have become deeply interdependent. Just as a bad
economy causes fuel prices to fall (as we saw in 2008), so high
fuel prices cause the economy to fall. An often cited threshold
is $85 per barrel, above which the price of fuel has a damaging
effect on the economy. Our current economic downturn was about
bad credit and a real estate bubble, but some analysts suspect
that the first card to be pulled out of the house of cards was the
spike in oil prices that briefly drove crude to $145 a barrel.

Instead of the steady decline shown in the EIA graph, we
may see a period of boom-and-bust cycles where a rising economy
causes a rise in fuel prices followed by an economic downturn and
falling fuel prices. If this happens, the point at which global
demand permanently exceeds global supply may, contrary to all the
estimates quoted above, be pushed clear into the next decade.
But this does not affect the basic finding that, as a society,
we will soon use much less liquid fuel, for several
reasons.

First, from here on out, both sides of the boom-and-bust cycle
limit the amount of fuel we will be consuming on average. Either
we will be employed but unable to afford the high fuel prices
associated with a good economy, or we will have lower fuel prices
in an economic downturn but be unable to buy any because we’re
unemployed.

Second is the fact that the U.S. imports most of its oil. So
for us, the question is not how much oil is being produced
globally, but how much of it is available for import. And from
this viewpoint, the picture looks very dark indeed. All the big
oil exporting countries have internal development needs to meet at
the same time that almost all of them are producing less oil every
year. The combination of increasing internal consumption and
decreasing oil production can very quickly send exports from a
given country to zero.

A third factor that guarantees less fuel available to us in the
future is China’s quiet acquisition of long-term contracts
with major oil producers, which will take a lot of oil out of the
open market we’ve been depending on to supply our needs.

Finally, the notion that the global economic cycle will be
driven by our national vicissitudes is based on the assumption
that the world economy depends on the U.S. economy. That’s
been true till now, but the moment the Chinese realize that
instead of lending us money to buy their products, they can lend
themselves the money to buy their products, we fall out of the
picture, and at that point we may well find ourselves with a
decreasing ability to pay for fuel that is becoming increasingly
expensive, with prices driven upward by an Asian economic
expansion that has decided to go on without us.

A Dangerous Situation

The more we consider the dependence of our economy on cheap
fuel, the more fragile it appears. Everything about the American
economy is based on the assumption that growth is inevitable;
indeed, compound interest itself—the bedrock of our
financial system—is based on this concept insofar as it
represents actual growth and not just inflation. Take that growth
away, and the whole thing collapses, as we saw when real estate
prices stopped increasing.

The unprecedented disappearance of spare liquid fuel production
capacity makes the system highly vulnerable to interruptions in
supply, as diagrammed here by TCLocal contributor Karl North; a
problem with oil production (far left) can set in motion a set of
feedback loops that brings down the entire economic system. From
this perspective, our current situation is actually rather
precarious.

While it’s devoutly to be hoped that we can get past the
inflection point of oil production with our society more or less
intact, no one should underestimate the downside potential of this
development. Another recent objective analysis, this one carried
out by the German Army (the Bundeswehr), summed up the consequences
of declining oil production for their country this way:

Investment will decline and debt service will be
challenged, leading to a crash in financial markets, accompanied
by a loss of trust in currencies and a break-up of value and
supply chains—because trade is no longer possible. This would in
turn lead to the collapse of economies, mass unemployment,
government defaults and infrastructure breakdowns, ultimately
followed by famines and total system collapse.

There is no reason to believe that the potential damage we
could be facing here in the U.S. would be any less than in
Germany, which is one of the richest and most advanced countries
in the world and one that has put far more effort into
transitioning to alternative energy than we have.

The Outlook for This Decade

These considerations lead to the conclusion that the watchword
for the coming decade is instability. We will probably
cycle between economic hardship and high fuel prices for a while,
and this cycle will militate against constructive responses. When
the economy is bad, we won’t have the money to spend on
sensible measures like alternative energy and mass transit, and
when it starts to recover, we’ll tell ourselves that the
problem was temporary and that we’ll soon be back to
business as usual. It’s an old story: when the roof leaks,
it’s raining too hard to fix it, and when it stops raining,
a fix isn’t needed…until the whole thing comes down on
our heads.

As murky as the future appears, however, some things are fairly
easy to predict. Here is a list of things that will probably have
occurred, or at least be starting to occur, by the end of this
decade.

Liquid fuels and energy in general will be more
expensive. This one’s easy. Even if we could keep expanding
oil production (which no one who has looked into it believes),
that oil will become increasingly more expensive to extract as we
are forced to look farther out into the ocean for it.

Less fuel will be available to use. This is another easy
call; either fuel will be too expensive, or we won’t be in a
position to buy as much as we used to.

We will have begun to stay closer to home. This is
already happening. Another way to put it is that life will become
more local.

Supply chains will have begun to contract. This is another
direct consequence of rising fuel prices. The distance that goods
travel to market became noticeably shorter in just the few months
during which we experienced the last price spike. Consequences
include a shift back to more local production.

Food (as a percentage of income) will be increasingly
expensive. Yet another direct consequence of the increasing
price of fuel, which is used in enormous quantities both to
produce food and to transport it over long distances. Farm land
will increase in value, and farm employment will rise as manual
labor begins to replace energy provided by liquid fuels.

We may begin to see occasional interruptions in some
services (electricity, water, sewer, internet, etc.). This one
is not as obvious as the preceding, as none of these services are
directly impacted by the price of liquid fuels; but huge
quantities of liquid fuel are consumed in maintaining all
of these service infrastructures, and rising fuel prices will
probably result in deferred maintenance and a possible consequent
lack of reliability. I don’t think this is likely before the end
of the decade, but it’s certainly a possibility, and one that
should be planned for.

Rationing of fuel and perhaps even food is possible by the
end of the decade. Rationing would demonstrate real
sensitivity for the social justice aspects of the situation, so I
don’t expect to see it happening any time soon, but it’s a
possibility.

Some broader developments are simply continuations of current
trends that will be accelerated by high fuel prices and their
effect on the overall economy.

Our standard of living will continue to fall.
U.S. household income in real dollars peaked in 1998-1999 and has
been declining ever since. There’s no reason to believe that this
trend will be reversed.

Fewer financial resources will be available to
government. This is another development that’s already
underway, and it means that most meaningful responses will have to
come from individual efforts or self-organized community action.

Providing health care for all will be increasingly
difficult. Responses include better health education, free
clinics, citizen involvement in county public health advisory
boards, and the assumption of greater responsibility for
maintaining our own health.

Military conflict over resources will become increasingly
likely. Which is, of course, why the U.S. Joint Command is so
interested in our energy outlook!

Final Thoughts

Three observations come out of all this.

The first half of the decade (2010-2015) looks better
than the second half (2016-2020). If you have any major
projects in mind, this might be a good time to get going. In
particular, this would be a good time to make infrastructure
improvements, establish a garden, and move closer to work (or
arrange to work closer to home).

The developments listed above as possible by 2020 are
virtually certain by 2030. The descent doesn’t stop until
we’ve achieved a state of equilibrium with a much lower
level of resource exploitation. That transition can be easier or
harder depending on how we approach it.

A lot of these developments can be prepared for. And
that is the purpose of TCLocal: to begin to plan for the future
looming on the near horizon. We hope that the foregoing gives the
context for our effort and that the articles we’ve published
here are helping us begin to confront and plan for the challenges
facing us over the coming decade. The following list provides
links to all the articles we’ve published so far.

This installment adds discussion of combined heat and power
applications. While continuing to focus on local efforts and local
projects, the article also examines the role of local and
larger-scale governmental entities in supporting the development
of the biomass industry in Tompkins County and considers some
roles played by local businesses and nonprofits. Some local
demonstration projects that were briefly mentioned in the earlier
articles are more fully considered here.

Abbott/Lund Hansen LLC

The U.S., with relatively abundant biomass resources, is far
behind some other countries in the use of those resources for heat
and power production. This has the perverse effect of encouraging
the export of US biomass resources to European countries, where
both governments and businesses have embraced the development of
technology and infrastructure to accommodate the use of non-fossil
fuels for these purposes. Conversely, the technology needed to use
North American biomass resources has often had to be imported from
Europe.

In any comparison of biomass use across nations, Denmark stands
out for the success it has had in weaning itself from a
petroleum-dependent infrastructure. The initial motivation for
this development was not an abundance of available alternative
resources, but, rather, a serious brush with scarcity in the wake
of the first oil shock. However, at this point, the success that
Denmark has attained in maximizing efficiency in combined heat and
power generation is also making Danish technology attractive
elsewhere around the world. Recently, a local businessman and real
estate developer and a Danish engineer established a new company
aimed at emulating the Danish approach to combined heat and
power.

In 2010, the new company Abbott/Lund Hansen LLC was formed,
joining a Danish district heating specialist with a Tompkins
County developer. District heating, as a concept, is the idea of
heating a number of adjacent or nearby buildings with one central
heating plant. In Denmark, super-efficient heating plants may be
operated on biomass fuel (pellets or chips) or traditional fuels
like natural gas. Combined heat and power (CHP) is also common in
the Danish systems, with the heat that is generated in the course
of making electricity for a district captured and used in heating
the district. Below is a synopsis of Abbott/Lund Hansen
LLC’s work, in the words of its founders.

Bruce Abbott and Thomas Lund Hansen recently formed a marketing
and lobbying firm that is advocating for district energy in
Tompkins County. A local example of district energy is at Cornell
University. In 1888 Cornell built a coal fired steam heat only
system for its campus. This year that system has been converted to
a natural gas fired steam combined heat and power (CHP)
system. Cornell’s CHP system will not only supply heat to
buildings on campus but it will supply 80% of Cornell’s
electricity needs. The only difference between the Cornell system
and the systems that Abbott/Lund Hansen are advocating is that the
Cornell system relies on steam and the Abbott/Lund Hansen systems
relies on hot water. For the end user, hot water CHP systems are
safer, more reliable, and cost less then comparable steam
systems.

Combined Heat and Power systems, in general, increase energy
efficiency by 30% while decreasing energy cost by 15%. There are
other advantages for building CHP systems in Tompkins County. CHP
systems can drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions because
they can burn a variety of fuels. For example, using biomass as
fuel would reduce [greenhouse gas emissions] to virtually zero for
the buildings that are connected to a biomass CHP system. Another
advantage CHP systems would have in Tompkins County is that there
would be numerous job opportunities building and operating these
systems…

Bruce Abbott stresses that the jobs created by district
generation/CHP will remain in the local economy and can’t be
transferred elsewhere, including the jobs harvesting and
manufacturing biomass fuel. The company envisions a number of
scenarios under which district generation/CHP could offer the
local economy job-creation and economic development
benefits. These major building projects require significant
capital investment to attain a scale that can realize the
efficiencies inherent in their design and reap the employment and
economic development benefits. One approach that Abbott has
advocated for Tompkins County is to have the AES Cayuga power
plant establish and operate these districts in areas where they
are practicable, such as the Downtown Ithaca Business District or
the South Hill Office Campus. The new company has also suggested
that Tompkins County (or the Town or City of Ithaca) might invest
in the development of heating districts. The new business,
Abbott/Lund Hansen, is also pursuing other opportunities to design
these combined heat and power generation districts in the region;
it has just signed a contract to do the preliminary design for a
biomass (wood-chip) CHP system that will supply the electricity,
heat, and air-conditioning for 700,000 square feet of mixed use
commercial and residential space in rural Pennsylvania.

It will be interesting to see what types of
entities—businesses/developments, educational institutions
and other nonprofits, or governmental bodies—will have the
vision, the capital and the sites to try this new approach to
providing heat and power. The adoption of these highly efficient
systems in the private sector can be advanced through governmental
incentives to adopt the technology, which is how the Danish system
came into being. What is needed is the will to transition, and a
plan for accomplishing the switch. Bruce Abbott puts it
succinctly:

In summary, moving toward a less costly, local, and reliable
energy solution that improves energy security and environmental
impact is possible today. What is required is a well-written plan
and the political will to put it into practice.

Cayuga Nature Center—Heated by Biomass

Some movement exists in New York State government to subsidize
the adoption of biomass heat. The New York State Energy Research
and Development Authority (NYSERDA) funded a demonstration project
to show how efficient and cost-effective biomass heat can be,
right here in Tompkins County at the Cayuga Nature Center. The
multi-fuel (woodchip or pellet) boiler used in this conversion to
biomass heat was the very first unit produced by a Schenectady
firm, ACT Bioenergy[3]. The firm has licensed European multi-fuel
boiler technology to produce these units in New York State from
all U.S.-made materials.

The 10,000 square foot Cayuga Nature Center lodge houses both
educational and administrative offices for the nonprofit
organization. Installation of the containerized boiler and
adjacent fuel storage areas did not require any construction work
or disruption of programs in the program and office
space. Existing hot-water radiators were used in the retrofit, and
all conversion work was kept in the basement area of the
building. The three existing propane boilers were kept in place to
act as an emergency back-up system. The fuel and the boiler
itself, in its containerized outdoor location, are an additional
educational display along a path that also includes other
educational exhibits and gorge overlooks used in Nature Center
programs.

Figure 1. The propane-fired system that formerly heated the
10,000 square foot Cayuga Nature Center. The system is kept on
standby as a backup

Figure 2. Exterior of new woodchip fired boiler. The wooden
feed bin on the right holds about a week's worth of fuel at
maximum boiler output. An auger automatically conveys fuel from
the hopper to the boiler

Figure 5. Chips are fed from below to the center of a grate at
the bottom of the combustion chamber. Optimal combustion is
achieved by controlling the air supplied through holes in the chip
bed and holes on the sides of the combustion chamber. The ash
produced by this process is less than one percent of the fuel
burned

Figure 6. A 12 x 40 foot shed (on the left) stores chips to
periodically replenish the feed bin (on the right). The shed was
constructed with volunteer help from Cornell Engineers for a
Sustainable World

Figure 7. Left: The storage shed in winter and the front loader
used to transfer chips to the feed bin; Right: Receiving a 10 ton
(50 cubic yard) chip delivery from Mesa Reduction of Auburn,
NY. The chips are made from the waste streams of regional lumber
mills. In the future, some fuel will come from CNC and other
nearby forests

This project would not have been possible without the
determined and persistent effort of TC Local contributor and local
biomass proponent Tony Nekut. NYSERDA was eager to have a
demonstration project, and the Cayuga Nature Center was eager to
solve the problem of high propane heat bills, but it took a local
activist to bring the need and those with the funding together to
make it work. While fuel costs have not yet been tabulated for the
year, it is estimated that the new boiler will result in a 50 to
75 percent savings in fuel.

The CNC installation is part of a larger NYSERDA effort to
support the evaluation and improvement of biomass-fired heating
equipment. According to a recent press release,[4]

The program will clear a path for New York-grown fuels, create
new manufacturing jobs, and improve environmental performance of
biomass technologies….

ACT’s project at the Cayuga Nature Center in Ithaca, NY,
will demonstrate a fully automated, 90 percent efficient
wood-gasification boiler technology that is proven in Europe and
adapted for the U.S. market. These systems have emissions that are
significantly better than conventional wood boilers and comparable
to typical oil or gas boilers. Mid-sized buildings
(10–100,000 sq.ft.) represent 90 percent of the boiler
market in the U.S., and are prime targets for these wood systems
which can achieve rapid paybacks when replacing fossil-fuel
boilers.

Town of Danby Highway Barns—Project to Retrofit ACT
Bioenergy Boiler Using American Reinvestment and Recovery Act
(ARRA) Funds

The Town of Danby has a high level of interest in biomass as a
heat and energy source. Not only are Town elected officials and
staff excited about the potential of making use of a local
resource in moving away from fossil fuels, the residents of the
Town are also very involved. Citizen involvement is primarily
through the Danby Land Bank Cooperative,[5] which “provides
an organization and an infrastructure that allows rural property
owners to use their fields and forests for grass and wood pellet
production.” In the neighboring township of Caroline, Cayuga
Biomass Energy, a small group of entrepreneurs that includes TC
Local contributor Tony Nekut, is attempting to start a biomass
pellet manufacturing plant.

The projected cost to convert the Town’s 10,000 square
foot office and truck bay complex to wood chip heat is about
$267,000. While the projected fuel cost savings are estimated to
be 50 percent or greater, a capital improvement of that scale is
difficult for a small rural township to budget or buy bonds for;
usually, help from a higher level of government is needed for
improvements on this scale. In this case, the Town administration
decided to pursue funding under the American Reinvestment and
Recovery Act (ARRA)-the federal stimulus package.

As in the Cayuga Nature Center project, biomass proponents
helped to bring the need and the source of funds together—in
this case, Tony and I helped the Town of Danby make application
for these funds by coordinating grant-writing and project
specification tasks.[6] In March of 2010, NYSERDA awarded these
federal funds to Danby. For its part in the project, the Town will
contribute some highway worker hours to the excavation and
concrete work needed to construct a covered fuel storage area. The
boiler unit, which is almost identical to the one in use at Cayuga
Nature Center, will be installed by a regional heating contractor,
and the jobs producing biomass fuel will be
hyper-local—ideally, in Danby or adjoining Caroline. In
fact, the Town Highway crews plan to produce some of the wood chip
fuel themselves in the process of keeping the roadways clear. This
is a good use of a federal program aimed at maintaining and
creating jobs in economically distressed counties like
Tompkins.

PJ Marshall, one of the principals of RPM Ecosystems[7], wanted
to provide the heat and power to operate the firm’s Town of
Dryden greenhouses and company headquarters while remaining
carbon-neutral. And she wanted to do so using only the products
RPM grows—native hardwood trees. Additionally, she sought to
develop and demonstrate a biomass plantation system using native
hardwood trees planted specifically for a combination fuel/lumber
harvest, staged to produce first fuel wood and then lumber, over a
number of years, while maximizing forest canopy and carbon
sequestration throughout the process. RPM pursued this plan
through local Congressman Michael Arcuri, looking to secure a
federal appropriation to fund the project.

The company made good progress in developing the project and
getting the appropriation drafted last year (2009) but then
encountered difficulties when Congress passed a rule requiring
that no appropriations go directly to private companies. RPM
regrouped and engaged TCAD[8] as a fiscal sponsor for the
projects. Heather Filiberto, Director of Economic Development
Services at TCAD, describes the agency and its role in the project
this way:

TCAD, the County’s lead economic development agency, is a
non-profit organization whose mission is to build a thriving and
sustainable economy that improves the quality of life in Tompkins
County by fostering the growth of business and employment. In
situations in which governmental funding must be received by a
non-profit, TCAD has stepped in and sponsored applications on
behalf of local entrepreneurs in the past. TCAD has agreed to
sponsor this request for federal funding on behalf of RPM.

In order to succeed in getting an appropriation in the federal
budget for a project, the applicants must obtain letters of
support from a wide variety of local officials. The typical
support letter is prepared by the applicant in overall substance,
then transferred to letterhead and signed by the various elected
officials with only slight modifications. The projects are briefly
described along with the expected benefit to the community. The
following excerpt, from Senator James Seward’s letter,
demonstrates the approach.

I am writing to express my strong support for Tompkins County
Area Development and RPM Ecosystems Ithaca LLC’s, innovative
Dryden, New York, green building and renewable energy project
titled Distributive Biomass Combined Heat and Power for
CO2-Neutral Facility Operations….

…this project helps install and commission a 200KWe
distributive biomass combined heat and power set for
sustainable/renewable electricity and thermal energy production in
support of RPM Ecosystems Ithaca LLC’s operations.…

TCAD, RPM Ecosystems, and Congressman Arcuri are all hopeful
that the funding for this project will be included in this
year’s federal budget. Still, the project must wait to
commence until the political process runs its course.

Individual Homeowners Can Access Governmental Biomass
Incentives

Some government-assisted financing options exist for individual
homeowners interested in converting some or all of the heat or hot
water produced in their homes to biomass fuels. Anyone who is in a
position to benefit from a tax incentive can receive up to 30
percent of the cost of a pellet stove (not to exceed $1,500) in
tax savings. A website is available to help with determining
whether this program meets your needs,[9] or contact the Pellet
Fuels Institute.[10] Local pellet stove merchants can also assist
in understanding the program and which units
qualify. Unfortunately, stoves and furnaces that burn cordwood are
not eligible for these incentives.

NYSERDA also has some homeowner financing programs[11] for the
installation of a pellet stove and for the energy efficiency
retrofits that can be accomplished in conjunction with a
transition to a heat source based on certain kinds of renewable
fuel. In general, cordwood stoves and furnaces are ineligible for
these programs. For homeowners with low or moderate income,
low-interest financing programs, and even some grants, are
available through Ithaca Neighborhood Housing Services.[12]
Similar programs are available through Tompkins Community
Action,[13] and some similar services may be available through
Better Housing for Tompkins County[14] as a part of home
rehabilitation. All of these housing agencies should be contacted
to determine what programs might work best for your individual
needs.

Most programs will require that you obtain a professional
energy audit to determine which energy improvements may be most
cost-effective for you. Even if you don’t use an incentive
program, an energy audit can help you to tackle energy investments
in the order that gives you the most benefit for the money
invested. Conservation measures and efficiency upgrades are often
more cost-effective than investing in a renewable fuel heat
source. The housing agencies linked above can provide referrals
for homeowners of all incomes to qualified energy audit providers
and Building Performance Institute (BPI) certified contractors. In
most cases, only BPI-certified contractors are eligible to perform
work that will qualify for incentives. These energy auditors and
BPI-certified contractors are also trained to make use of
up-to-date methods and products for saving energy and using
renewable fuels.

Funding and Finagling: Negotiating the Political Process to
Transition to Biomass

Local, state, and federal governments are involved in energy
policy and the implementation of energy projects in a number of
different and evolving ways. Even a very savvy and motivated
community such as Tompkins County may find it difficult to work
the system well enough to get sufficient funding and financing for
transitions to carbon-neutral and renewable fuel sources. Over
time, government-funded energy efforts at conservation, which
should always be the first step in a sustainable energy plan, have
become institutionalized in a way that makes them more accessible
to homeowners, businesses, and other community
institutions. However, renewable energy conversions remain new
enough that the path to government sponsorship is not always
clear-in both the sense of “visible” and “free
of obstructions.”

Some motivated activists claim that the slow grinding of the
gears in the public sector is not worth the patience to
accommodate. The fastest and best approach when projects are
low-tech and inexpensive may be a community barn-raising kind of
effort. However, commercial-scale projects in large buildings, or
the highly efficient district heat and power systems that group
many buildings in a densely developed area on one heating system,
can’t easily be accomplished via small-scale community
efforts. Both funding and implementation will typically require
some level of governmental assist or substantial private
investment of capital.

How do thinkers, planners, and activists work most effectively
to bring about a transition away from fossil fuel dependence?
Understanding the ways that the layers of government divvy up
responsibility, and how they do and don’t collaborate, is an
important place to start when developing a strategy.

Planning efforts go on at all levels of
government—federal, state, regional, county, and
municipal. Professional planners are often those who elected
officials turn to for information and explanation of policy
options, even though elected officials themselves enact policy. It
is productive to educate both planners and elected officials about
new policies on renewable energy enacted by other governments and
to call their attention to demonstrations of new technology. By
definition, planners are charged with taking the long view of our
situation, and may be the first to show interest in emerging
technology and trends. Eventually, however, elected officials must
choose to implement new projects.

Those of us, planners or otherwise, who take a long view of our
local adjustment to energy descent may consider funding for
transitions away from dependence on fossil fuel to be one of the
most vital things our governments can do to assure our future
security. Implementing that transition can be accomplished by
educating elected officials and the professional planners who
advise them, and also by applying for and using the funds (grants
and capital) and financing (low-interest loans and tax-exempt
bonds) for the purpose when such are available. The process is
likely to be difficult, even frustrating at times. To lead the way
to a renewable-fuels future, we should focus on creating the will,
knowledge, and capacity to make good use of every opportunity for
implementing projects. The more we show each other how to heat
with renewable fuels, the more examples of successful projects
will be available to help others understand the
benefits. Eventually, we will reach a tipping point at which the
logic of using sustainable, renewable sources for our heat and
power will make more sense than fighting one another for a
rapidly-diminishing stock of polluting fossil fuels.

[6] Contact Tony Nekut or Krys Cail through the comments
section linked to this article if your Tompkins County
municipality or school district is interested in pursuing biomass
heat funding; we are interested in sharing information.

This article continues the discussion of heating with local
biomass begun in our October feature, “Burning
Transitions” (http://tclocal.org/2009/10/burning_transitions.html).
There it was noted that the best application for local biomass
energy is combustion for space heating, possibly coupled with
distributed CHP (combined heat and power) electricity generation,
and that these technologies are, for the most part, already
developed and available in the form of high-efficiency gasifying
boilers and pellet stoves.

Work is required along the entire supply chain (growing,
harvesting, processing, distribution, and utilization) if local
biomass energy is going play a significant role in Tompkins
County’s energy future. The traditional economic
stakeholders are a diverse group of mutually dependent players
(landowners, loggers, foresters, farmers, manufacturers, fuel
retailers, and consumers), each requiring commitment from the
others to make the system work. Leadership and planning are
essential to moving beyond gridlock by demonstrating how, through
cooperation, everyone along the chain stands to
benefit. Fortunately, there are a variety of case histories and
other resources that have been developed in recent decades that
render this demonstration somewhat easier.

Barring unforeseen breakthroughs in energy technology, it seems
clear that this resource will indeed be developed. Local biomass
is already cost competitive with fossil fuels for space heating,
and its economic viability will only improve as fossil fuel prices
continue to rise. The time has therefore arrived to begin
development, because time will be required build the needed
infrastructure.

The scale of the local biomass development challenge

Every form of biomass yields about 16 million BTUs per dry ton
when burned. Sustainable annual biomass productivity ranges from
about 0.5 dry tons per acre for our local forests to 5 dry tons
per acre for some locally suited energy crops. These
productivities represent conversion efficiencies from solar
radiant energy to stored chemical energy of about 0.1 to 1
percent. If half of Tompkins County’s 300,000 acre land area
were committed to growing biomass, the annual per capita energy
production would range from about 12 to 120 million BTUs. (See the
discussion of County land cover in the October “Burning
Transitions” article.) By comparison, current (2007)
statewide annual per capita primary energy consumption is 219
million BTUs. In other words, the amount of biomass energy we
could get from our land even in relatively rural Tompkins County
would yield nowhere near our total energy needs.

Meeting our heating needs is another matter. Each household in
the County uses about 100 million BTUs annually for water and
space heating; this is about 43 million BTUs annually per capita
— approaching the range of sustainable large-scale local
production. Adding the wholesale implementation of residential
energy efficiency measures would bring total heating energy
self-sufficiency within reach. Ed Marx, Tompkins County
Commissioner of Planning and Public Works, has been quoted as
estimating that biomass could heat up to 40 percent of the homes
in the county, or even more if homes were super-insulated.

The biomass heating gap

Local biomass energy for heating has enormous potential
benefits. It creates jobs, keeps money local, provides energy
security, reduces CO2 emissions (locally burned biomass
is virtually carbon-neutral), increases carbon sequestration,
slows fossil fuel depletion, improves forest and soil health,
maintains rural land values, reduces development pressures,
creates community ties, and raises community environmental
awareness. But fewer than 5 percent of County homes are listed in
census data as heated primarily with biomass (cordwood and
pellets). For 2008, the Census Bureau’s American Community
Survey estimates the percentages shown in the following diagram
for heating the 37,749 occupied housing units of Tompkins
County.

The apparent lack of interest in heating with wood shown by the
4.5 percent figure is partly an artifact of the way the data is
gathered and partly due to active discouragement of wood heat by
mortgage lenders and insurance companies.

Wood heat appliances do not enjoy wide acceptance by those who
underwrite mortgages and insure homes. Due to the perceived risk
of fire, many underwriters of homeowners insurance will not insure
properties with wood stoves. (Pellet stoves, which are less likely
to cause chimney fires, are a bit more acceptable.) In particular,
homes that include rental units — even if the home is also
owner-occupied — are very difficult to insure if there is
wood-burning equipment in use for heating and the insurer is aware
of that fact.

Of course, homeowners insurance is a requirement for any house
that has a mortgage. But it is not just the reticence of
homeowners insurance underwriters to insure homes with woodstoves
that limits use of this technology; there is also a problem
associated with wood heat when the lender packages the mortgage
for resale on the secondary mortgage market. Despite the worldwide
use of this simple technology, burning wood to heat a dwelling is
perceived as too risky. Where woodstoves are a secondary, rather
than primary, source of heat, this is overlooked. But a home that
relies predominantly on wood for its heating source is a home
whose purchase will be difficult to finance.

Gaining a more accurate estimate of local trends

This situation — which makes it plausible to add wood
heat as a secondary heat source, but difficult to rely on it as a
primary heat source — helps explain why the census figures
for wood heat seem so low. This is a problem even in the decennial
direct counts.

The between-decades estimates suffer from an additional
problem: there’s no mechanism for reporting a local
trend. Households demographically similar to the various household
types in Tompkins County are surveyed at various locations around
the country, and the composite picture of their changes is applied
to local households with similar characteristics. For instance, if
upper-income professional couples with two or fewer children in
the home were, for the most part, heating with natural gas across
the US, there would be no mechanism for the American Community
Survey to read a recent upswing in purchases of woodstoves and
pellet stoves among local college and university faculty.

To get a better idea of what’s really happening locally,
we had to ask around. The results, while anecdotal, point to just
such a trend.

The sales managers of both local woodstove/pellet stove retail
outlets indicated that business has been steadily increasing
throughout the decade, with particularly noticeable upswings in
wood heat appliance purchases when other forms of fuel —
particularly fuel oil — experienced price run-ups or price
volatility. Both described their typical customers as college
professors or other professionals interested in saving money and
in helping to conserve non-renewable resources. While families
living in more rural and suburban locations were the norm for
local wood heat users at the beginning of the decade, the
increasing popularity of pellet stoves has resulted in more urban
families buying wood heating appliances.

A construction manager at Ithaca Neighborhood Housing Services,
which administers a group of NYSERDA programs aimed at green
energy for heating, concurred that more urban residents are
choosing pellet stoves, and that the help available from NYSERDA
resulted in more low- and moderate-income families being able to
access affordable financing to add wood heat to their homes.

Another indication of the rising local popularity of wood heat
of various sorts is the brisk business that fuel purveyors are
doing in cordwood and pellets. The owner-operator of Finger Lakes
Firewood, the largest local cordwood dealer, has purchased
additional automated equipment to better clean and move his
cordwood as his customer base has continued to expand. Ithaca
Agway has been using its display sign to advertise pellets, and
the Home Depot devoted as much space at the front door to
sale-price wood pellets as to the snow blowers.

Industrial uses of wood heat

Wood heat is beginning to appear in local industrial
operations, too. For example, US Salt in Watkins Glen is in the
process of converting the heating of its large facility on Seneca
Lake to biomass.

According to Len Boughton, an engineer with the firm who has
been responsible for overseeing the construction and retrofitting,
the system, after two years of work, is now in place and
operational, but the switch to wood-based fuel will wait till
March to allow troubleshooting during a season of less extreme
heating demand.

Plant Manager Frank Pastore said that US Salt has contracted
with TreeSource Solutions (http://treesourcesolutions.com/)
to avoid the management burden of dealing with multiple suppliers.
TreeSource is a wholly owned subsidiary of Catalyst Renewables (http://www.catalystrc.com/).
Pastore said that he expected the bulk of the fuel to come from
local sources, through the Wood Yard that TreeSource has
established nearby in Burdett, but that he trusted the contractor
to source wood fuel as appropriate in order to maintain a stable
and affordable price.

Buying and selling biomass in Burdett

The Wood Yard at the old railroad depot in the Village of
Burdett was, in its last incarnation, a steel recycling facility,
and many of the buildings are simply being reused “as
is” the old depot itself is used as a scalehouse for
weighing trucks. The facility includes a large, rambling lot with
a gated entrance from State Route 79. The Yard was not officially
open the day of our visit, but it’s clear that the facility
is used in a number of synergistic ways in addition to providing a
means to weigh and store wood intended for use as biomass
fuel.

Entrance to the Burdett Wood Yard

A recently constructed pole barn houses a portable bandsaw
mill, and some rough-milled lumber showed that the facility is in
active use. A large pile of logs awaiting conversion to woodchips
was evidence of the yard’s role as a source of fuel, though
there was no tub grinder on site. A tub grinder, which can cost up
to a million dollars, is typically portable over the road system
and will presumably be brought onto the site to process the logs
as needed.

Portable bandsaw mill at the Burdett Wood Yard

Arrangements for dropping off wood and arranging payment are
made directly with TreeSource Solutions’s buyer, Jack
Santamour, who spends most of his time at TreeSource’s
facility in the Adirondacks and manages the Burdett yard via
telephone with the help of some local employees. TreeSource is
currently buying logs by the ton every Friday or by
appointment.

Wood awaiting processing by TreeSource Solutions

A cooperative model of biomass production in Danby

One key to sustainable local wood heat in Tompkins County is
the creation of a system whereby local landowners can convert
otherwise unused or underutilized farm or pasture land to biomass
production. The Danby Land Bank Cooperative (http://www.danbylandbank.com/)
provides an organization and infrastructure that allows owners of
10 or more acres in the Town of Danby to use their fields and
forests (much of it marginal for farming) for grass and wood
pellet production.

Built on a classic cooperative model, the goal of the Land Bank
is “to unify fragmented and non-farming rural landowners to
form a large enough agricultural base to provide economies of
scale.” Local members of the co-op lease their land to be
harvested of perennial grasses as feedstocks for grass pellets or
briquettes; the land is cleared for free, and the owners receive
tax credits and, eventually, a share of the profits.

In operation barely a year, the DLBC has already gained 20
owner-members with more than 350 acres devoted to the project.
Governance structures are in place, and plans are in the works to
incorporate as a legal cooperative. The project, aided by
consultation with the County Planning Department and close
cooperation with Cornell Cooperative Extension, received major
publicity in November with the appearance of a feature article in
Rural Cooperatives, a publication of the U.S. Department of
Agriculture (www.rurdev.usda.gov/rd/pubs/RuralCoop_NovDec09_Final.pdf).

First hay cutting of the Danby Land Bank Cooperative (photo
courtesy of DLBC)

Establishment of a local pelletizing plant has been identified
as a key to long-term sustainability and economic viability
through reduction of transportation costs. The pellets, which are
manufactured by grinding, drying, and extruding raw biomass into a
dense, free-flowing fuel of consistent quality that can be
efficiently used in inexpensive residential appliances, have a
retail market value per dry ton well over twice that of the raw
feedstocks. The value added more than covers manufacturing costs,
so pelleting can provide an economically viable link between local
biomass suppliers and the existing local pellet market.

The DBLC recently joined with Energy Independent Caroline to
sponsor Town Hall meetings in Danby and Caroline regarding a
company called Community Biomass Energy, which proposes to build a
local biomass pelletizing mill on Boiceville Road in Caroline just
south of State Route 79. (Disclosure: One of us (Nekut) is a
principal in this effort.) See the DBLC’s newsletter
(linked from their web
site) for details and updates. The December 2009 issue is at
http://www.danbylandbank.com/site/resources_files/DLBC_Newsletter_Dec_2009.pdf.

Unresolved issues

Local biomass harvesting and processing hold great promise for
reestablishing the county's ability to provide for its own heating
needs. However, several issues remain unresolved.

We need to relocalize food production, too. While much of
the land in the county that could produce biomass for heating is
marginal for raising cultivated crops, a substantial percentage of
that land could alternatively serve for rotational grazing of
livestock, which is arguably a less-intensive, lower-input use of
the same acreage. Thus the optimum allocation of land for biomass
production vs. land for grazing or the production of winter hay
remains an open question whose eventual resolution will depend on
a number of variables that are difficult to predict.

The increased use of biomass for heating will increase
economic incentives to harvest wood resources beyond a level
that's sustainable. The large-scale reversion of former Central
New York farmland to successional forest over the last half
century makes it easy to forget how quickly the forest can be
cleared again. The establishment of sustainable forest management
practices will be essential to the return of biomass heating as a
long-range relocalization strategy.

The rediscovery of biomass as a heat source has created a
market for American wood chips as far away as Europe. Our
region's potential as a major biomass producer also makes it
susceptible to the kind of resource exploitation we associate with
third-world countries. Heating our homes with local biomass won't
succeed if higher prices cause local biomass to be exported rather
than used locally.

The need for greater local control over the allocation of our
local resources argues for the establishment of biomass harvesting
and processing facilities under local management and provides
further reason to hope for the success of initiatives such as the
Danby Land Bank Cooperative and the proposed Community Biomass
Energy facility in Caroline.

Online wood heating resources

Cornell Cooperative Extension has posted an excellent collection
of links to articles on firewood resources and heating with wood
on their statewide web site at

Introduction

This article provides a framework for considering the
socio-economic structural changes that can lead to a different,
more stable, and more sustainable local market for heating fuel
and electrical energy.

The use of combustion for heat and power is an established and
developed technology, while the successful social balancing of
environmental and ecological costs with short-run economic benefit
is a new, and daunting, challenge. The change, or transition,
needed to use the locally available resource of non-food woody and
grassy biomass to help solve current energy problems is
socio-economic change, not technical innovation. We can supplant
at least some current fossil fuel use with the more carbon-neutral
combustion of earth surface harvested feedstocks using current
technology. Nonfood biomass direct combustion[1] can be undertaken
in a localized context. We can take an enlightened approach to the
sustainable management of feedstock planting, growing, and
harvesting, energy-efficient processing, complete and clean
burning, and ash recycling. Developing such a system also offers a
means of developing the alternative commercial channels necessary
to move the Tompkins County area to a future of heat and energy
production that is not just more environmentally friendly, but
also more economically insulated, or decoupled, from the gyrations
of the world oil market in a time of post-peak oil.

Other current and emerging heat and power technologies, such as
solar, wind, geothermal, and small-scale hydro are
“greener” forms of alternative energy and may be our
future mainstays. However, in biomass-rich locations like Tompkins
County, the economic attraction of biomass as an affordable
substitute for fossil fuels will ensure that it will come into
commercial use as oil and other energy commodities rise in
price. If the development of biomass energy is controlled by the
current energy industry, large energy companies will guard their
market share by organizing only large-scale markets, even in
situations where energy efficiency favors smaller, more localized
scale. Conversely, building localized commercial structures to
sell nonfood biomass-generated heat and electrical energy could
feasibly provide a template for the effective investment in and
commercialization of localized energy from other, greener sources
in the future.

The kind of community development that allows areas the size of
Tompkins County to become more energy
self-reliant—”import substitution” for the
energy products of the fossil fuel industry—can accomplish
the twin goals of creating green jobs and modeling the kind of
less global, more local commercial/economic interactions that are
referred to as relocalization. Relocalization of energy provision
is a necessary response to energy descent; accomplishing this
using tested community development practices will ensure better
success in the required transition.

The First Two Burning Transitions

Combustion (fire), used as a tool, was a major human cultural
advance, and perhaps helped our species to evolve. In his recent
book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human,[2] Richard
Wrangman, a Harvard University biological anthropologist,
postulates that the taming of fire, and its use to cook food, was
the key tool-using event that allowed human evolution to proceed
from pre-human hominid to modern humankind. He postulates that
cooked food allowed us to divert calories from chewing to growing
larger brains.

The centrality of fire to the establishment of human society is
also evidenced in religions and belief systems worldwide. One
classic rendition is the myth of Prometheus, the champion of
humankind who was said to have stolen fire for use by mortals from
the immortal gods.

From ancient times up until the Industrial Revolution, humans
used combustion sustainably, with only localized or regional
instances of deforestation.[3] Early burning was carbon-neutral as
far as the earth’s atmosphere was concerned.

Some primitive peoples did set massive fires. For instance,
Plains Indians used prairie fires to stampede buffalo over cliffs;
Tompkins County’s first peoples probably (like New England’s
natives) routinely burned the forest understory to make for easier
hunting access;[4] and innumerable horseback European raiders
ransacked and ruined settled villages with fire—as
Revolutionary War General Sullivan did here in the Finger Lakes.
These combustion materials were already a part of the earth
surface/atmosphere carbon exchange. In geologic/atmospheric time,
even very big surface fires are just blips. The carbon released
into the atmosphere would have otherwise been added shortly anyway
through decomposition. It was the Industrial Revolution and the
use of first coal, and then oil and natural gas, that began the
process of unbalancing the planet’s atmospheric carbon load by
making use of the carbon stores of former eons, previously safely
buried underground. This led to both global climate change, and to
the depletion of easily extractable in-ground carbon sources we
speak of as peak oil and energy descent.[5]

The first “burning transition,” then, was the
Prometheus transition. This transition changed humankind (if you
don’t believe Richard Wrangman that it changed our evolution, you
must at least concede that it drastically altered our culture).
The Prometheus transition enabled the development of agriculture
and led to deforestation in a few subcontinental areas But the
second burning transition—and the advent of the steam and
internal combustion engines of the Industrial
Revolution—resulted eventually in major land and sea
transformation and widespread ecosystem and climactic change. The
first burning transition changed humankind, while the second
burning transition changed the planet. Each burning transition
also markedly changed the socio-economic systems that people used
to regularize and control the commercial and familial
relationships that provide us essentials such as heat in cold
weather, food, and, after the second burning transition, electric
power.

Planning a Third Burning Transition

Technological optimism about alternative fuel development
usually focuses on replacing combustion of “dirty”
fuels with combustion of “clean” fuels, while leaving
the production and distribution systems for liquid and gaseous
fuels and electrical power in its heritage configuration. That
configuration is controlled by some of the most powerful
international corporations on earth—oil and gas developing,
refining and shipping companies, electrical utilities, and
coal-mining and shipping companies. These actors have a vested
interest in seeing that the socio-economic systems of the future
do not deviate too much from those of the past, ensuring these
corporations continued market share. Is that to our
advantage?

Is the needed change limited to a substitution of one fuel for
another, one feedstock for another, or one power source for
another, with no substantive change to social, industrial,
political, or economic institutions? Or is a more substantive
transition needed? Will social and economic change follow
technology, or will we invent and popularize only the technologies
our social and economic systems predispose us to aim toward?

“Local planning for sustainable use of local
resources” is the basis of egalitarian post-colonial social
and economic development. It is also the key to the development
of a third, socioeconomic/cultural burning transition. Rather than
assume an international market in energy as a given and hope for
technological fixes, we should focus in the third burning
transition on the relocalization of systems of sourcing,
producing, and distributing heat and power. In that context, the
on-going technological development can be decoupled from the
economic fortunes of transnational corporations that are difficult
to call to account on environmental effects in any particular
place. A different kind of optimism about confronting the
challenges of global climate change and peak oil can be
envisioned, one in which the needed change in socio-economic
structures is the direct goal, in order to accomplish the most
efficient and environmentally-sound use of energy within
current technological and environmental limits. This might
then be followed by additional technological advancement, as
needed and affordable—perhaps even a Solar or Geothermal
transition that makes burning itself unnecessary. However, those
possibilities are too far away for a complete transition right
now, and right now is when global climate change must be
addressed. Rather than trust humanity’s on-going scientific and
technological innovation to “come up with something”
that will make unfettered world markets in energy able to function
within environmental limits, this optimism postulates that human
communities can learn to balance their own energy needs with the
sustainability of their own environments through socio-economic or
socio-political progress.

The third burning transition is, in essence, a relocalization
of energy production and an implementation of the household and
commercial structures needed to manage more local production and
consumption of energy, one that brings the source and use points
of energy geographically closer together. This is a transition
that requires no new or special technological development, but
rather advancements in business form development and industrial
design, including business and consumer combustion equipment and
new approaches to the design of district heating and electrical
power grids.

The Need for a Local Approach

Localities differ in what kind of resources they have available
to produce heat and power. Thus far, most research and
development in the area of biomass use as an alternative energy
feedstock has used a non-localized model. Raw biomass is
generally first converted into liquid fuel (both corn-based and
cellulosic ethanol are liquid fuels), and then distributed via
pipeline, tanker, and tanker truck, similar to petroleum. Or,
alternatively, biomass is burned directly, but the resulting heat
is made into electric energy and distributed far and wide on the
electric grid. Both of these models contain large
distributional inefficiencies.[6]

Government subsidies for one form of fuel over another can have
unforeseen effects. Often, governments subsidize use of
“cleaner” or more carbon-neutral fuels or combustion
equipment via a direct consumer subsidy, such as a tax credit, or
an indirect subsidy, such as a producer tax break or capital
investment in production plant and equipment. Corn
ethanol—an alternative fuel that even its promoters are now
seeing as a “transitional” alternative fuel—is
an example of how governmental enthusiasm for jobs, plant, and
equipment in every legislator’s district can result in a glut of
relatively expensive alternative fuel production in remote areas,
with little hope of export at a profit in the face of price
variation in the oil markets, where the product competes
directly.

Some European governments have backed the development of
small-scale solid-fuel biomass combustion, from pellet stoves to
wood-chip furnaces to multi-fuel-burning combustion units and
ultra-efficient gasification boilers that power electric
generators as well as district heating grids. While this has led
to much more widespread adoption of the technologies than in the
US, there are still some perverse global-market effects. The
governmental support for wood pellet burning in Northern Europe
(direct consumer subsidies for pellet stoves, for instance) has
resulted in the US market for wood pellets being significantly
impacted by European demand: shortages of wood pellets in both the
US and Europe in recent years have been blamed, in part, on the
fact that most wood pellets produced in the US are shipped, under
contract, to Europe, rather than available for growing domestic
use.[7] If the domestic demand for wood pellets rises because fuel
oil rises significantly in price, manufacturers can’t satisfy it,
and resulting shortages drive up wood pellet prices in tandem with
fuel oil prices.

Government support for the development of green energy is
surely needed. But, as illustrated above, direct support for
particular technologies can have perverse outcomes, when, in the
real world, the variable and uncontrollable price of oil
interferes with orderly marketing of the product as a substitute
for the fuel and power sources people are accustomed to using.
For that reason, localized community-controlled energy development
for heat and electricity is preferable, as it can reasonably allow
a community or geographic region to claim its own energy resources
and begin to decouple its energy costs from the world oil market.
In addition, as is the case with consumers developing commercial
relationships with their local farmers, a measure of consumer
loyalty and flexibility can be gained by localizing the
transaction.

The third burning transition will look different in different
locations. Relocalization offers the opportunity for each region
or locality to assess what underutilized or sustainably
developable resources it possesses, as well as what market power
its heat and energy consumers represent. The skills and resources
of local people must be accounted for, as well as underutilized
natural resources and plant and equipment in the built
environment. This assessment of resources can be done as a part of
a tried and true methodology of community and economic
development—Asset-based Community Development.[8] An
asset-based approach to community development allows for
customizing programmatic goals to highlight natural resources,
human capital agglomerations, and other local conditions that will
make one form of biomass more feasible to use as a feedstock for
combustion than another.

The local foods movement has made some use of the phrase
“Eat your landscape.” The idea is that, by engaging in
an ongoing direct involvement in growing food (gardening or CSA
working membership) or direct-from-the-local-farmer commercial
interaction with a manager of food producing lands in your locale
(“landscape”), one can exercise, in common with one’s
neighbors, some influence over what kind of a landscape it is now
and in future. The goal is use that is environmentally sound,
sustainable, and provides a living wage to those who manage and
work the land.

A similar approach can be taken to the orderly and sustainable
harvest and cultivation of biomass for combustion in place of oil,
gas, and, especially, coal. Although these fuel substitutions are
not the ultimate long-term solutions to our energy problems, they
do offer us a mechanism for developing the distributed, local
commercial interactions that can and will set the stage for the
development of more long-term sustainable energy systems. In much
of Tompkins County, for instance, woody and grassy biomass may be
available for use as a combustion fuel, but the commercial
infrastructure to sustainably and profitably grow, harvest, and
process that biomass needs to be developed. Without a community
development effort in this area, woodlands and pastures in
Tompkins County will continue to fall into an unused and unmanaged
condition that does not allow for optimum carbon sequestration and
invasive plant control and does not support the development of
local energy and green jobs.

In Tompkins County, most of the underutilized resource is
privately owned forested or pasture/hay land that is minimally
managed and, in some cases, is becoming overgrown with invasive
brush species. The following chart shows the acreage of various
types of landcover in the county.

The accompanying map shows a pattern of land use that conforms
to topography: the northern portion of the county, which is
composed of flatter land and relatively more of the better soils
for agricultural use, has a greater percentage of acreage in
cultivated cropland and pasture, while the southern, hillier
portion of the County is more densely wooded.

Organizing for Local Energy Production and Consumption of Biomass

“Eat your landscape” implies sustainability. A
bountiful landscape might continue to provide food over decades,
centuries, even millennia if it were properly managed and
husbanded. “Burn your landscape” has none of the
overtones of sustainability—it seems, rather, cataclysmic: a
landscape devoid of living things.

There are other options, however. An actively managed forest
or hayfield can continue to produce biomass for combustion
purposes over a long period of time if attention to the ecosystem
allows for the return of depleted soil nutrients through ash
spreading and the building of fertility through support of various
plant and animal communities. Woodlands actively managed for
sustainable harvest of woody biomass could provide plant and
animal habitat, sequester carbon, and produce some hardwood lumber
as well. The key here is the way in which natural resource
lands are managed. Under some systems of management, carbon
sequestration and selection to impede the advance of invasive
species are optimized, creating a forest that is more hospitable
to native flora and fauna and more able to ameliorate the excess
atmospheric carbon than the previous unmanaged woodland. However,
such management systems are not the most economically viable under
current market structures.

Current economic structures, if left unchecked, could cause
cataclysmic environmental damage as harvested biomass becomes less
costly than oil. Clear-cutting woodlands, while devastating to
natural communities and water quality, is the cheap way to amass a
large tonnage of biomass in an area like Tompkins County. Utility
companies buy wood-chip tonnage to co-fire with coal from low
bidders, developing an industry built around mechanized, invasive
forest destruction. Environmental regulation has proven to be a
weak tool for controlling industries that have a market incentive
to use forests or grasslands as a short-term, rather than
permanent, resource. An example is the Catalyst Energy/Treesource
Solutions biomass aggregation facility in nearby Burdett, Schuyler
County, which is offering loggers one low price for biomass
tonnage to be used as wood chips to heat and power the US Salt
plant in Watkins Glen.

On an individual scale, landowners who use firewood for heat
are likely to take the long view of their investment in their land
and do their best to manage their woods to maintain sustained
production as well as multi-functionality (use of the woodlands
for additional purposes, such as wildlife habitat, hunting, nature
appreciation, privacy). When surveyed, owners of rural acreage in
Tompkins County were amenable to seeing their underutilized
parcels of land produce an income stream—but very few had
either time or capital to devote to this.[9]

Several local initiatives in Tompkins County have sprung up to
test structures that might become a part of a third burning
transition here. In the Town of Danby, landowners have come
together to market the biomass from their properties (as well as
potentially other land-based products) as a group. This
organization of owners of fallow fields and under-managed woodlots
is based on the producer-coop configuration that has been
successful in some agricultural areas.[10]

Another effort, spearheaded by Anthony Nekut, is intended to
draw together investors and entrepreneurs with the purpose of
developing a medium-scale pellet production facility in the
county. Tony would like such a plant to have the capacity to
palletize both woody and grassy biomass, and he envisions both
local sourcing of biomass and local sales of pellets for home and
business heating. [An article by Tony is scheduled for future
publication on tclocal.org.—Ed.]

A third approach to using biomass to supplant some of the
fossil fuels used for home heating in Tompkins County is Abbot
Development’s initiative to develop Cornell University workforce
housing on a Danish-style district heating model, with a combined
heat and power plant as an integral feature of the development.
This plan is currently in concept development stage, but it could
easily be implemented if chosen by Cornell as the model for their
new housing development. Again, the technology is available and
ready to use; it is the commercial market structures that require
some developmental attention to establish such a project in this
country.

A fourth local project focuses on commercial combined heat and
power along with a managed woody-biomass plantation scheme: RPM
Ecosystems, a Dryden company involved in the production of
fast-growing nursery stock for reforestation projects worldwide,
has worked with Congressman Michael Arcuri to obtain federal
funding for a demonstration project. The project involves a
wood-fired combined heat and power plant that would provide heat
for the greenhouses and offices of the nursery along with
sufficient electrical power to operate the facility.
Additionally, plantations of RPM Ecosystems trees would be
established with a goal of producing some biomass along with some
hardwood lumber while maximizing forest canopy (and carbon
sequestration) throughout the growth and development of the tree
farm.

One approach that is not currently in evidence in Tompkins
County, but might be worth investigating, is the
“CSE.” CSE stands for “Community Supported
Energy,” and it is modeled on the successful CSA (Community
Supported Agriculture) structure. This is something of a consumer
cooperative: energy consumers that would like to use local
resources to produce energy band together, and, through pooling
investment funds, establish critical mass to bring a production
facility on-line, which they pledge to support through their
energy purchases. This model was first promoted by environmental
advocate Greg Pahl, and has been tried with some success in
Vermont.[11]

Conclusion

The above examples merely scratch the surface of possible
structures for relocalizing our heat and energy markets. And the
traditional approach should not be ignored, either: use of
cordwood for home and business heating has increased markedly as
fossil fuel prices increase and can be expected to continue to
increase, particularly in rural areas of the county. More people
now make a main business or a profitable sideline of harvesting
firewood, or buy less fossil fuel because they harvest some
firewood for their own use. Several local retail outlets and
service businesses sell and/or install combustion equipment, and
technology refinements have made cordwood burning cleaner and more
efficient than it was in the past.

A third burning transition—based on community development
and economic innovation—is needed if we are to avoid the
worst potential effects of global climate change and post-peak-oil
economic instability. In the first burning transition, fire
changed humankind; in the second, humankind using fire changed the
world until disaster threatened. In the third burning transition,
humankind must organize new structures of production and exchange
to socially contain the power that unlimited individual fire-use
unleashes on the world, to protect both the species and the
environment on which it depends. In the future, the structures so
organized can be again transformed, in a fourth burning
transition, to non-carbon-based feedstocks such as the sun’s
direct energy, geothermal heat, and wind and wave energy.

Notes

[1] “Direct combustion” refers to biomass burned as
a solid fuel, not a liquid or gas fuel product or fuel
additive.

[2] New York: Basic Books, 2009.

[3] Localized or regional deforestation should not be
underestimated in its capacity to decimate human, animal, and
plant communities, including driving some species to extinction.
It does not, however, represent a pattern of world-wide changes,
despite its severe impact on circumscribed areas.

[4] Cronon, William. Changes in the Land, Revised Edition:
Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York:
Hill and Wang, 1983.

[5] Biomass/ethanol/biodiesel schemes dependent upon
intensively cultivated food crops like soy or corn fail to break
the connection between the oil market and alternative fuel if a
system of petro-chemical input dependent agriculture is used.
They also raise grave ethical concerns, commonly referred to as
the “food-fuel controversy.”

[6] While current average distributional losses for electrical
energy are in the range of seven percent, biomass resources, like
solar resources, may be located at a greater distance from
urbanized areas than existing power plants, resulting in even
larger distributional losses or larger amounts of transportation
energy to move the raw material closer to the point of use.

[9] Cail, Krys. Tompkins County Landowners Survey.
Report for Cornell Cooperative Extension of Tompkins County on the
results of a mail survey of owners of large parcels of rural land
in Tompkins County undertaken by the Green Cities class of Cornell
University’s City and Regional Planning Department in 2005.

[10] Begun as a project for Elizabeth Keokosky’s masters degree
in City and Regional Planning at Cornell University, this
initiative has progressed to the point of establishing a local
steering committee and is in the process of drawing up
incorporation documents.

Some time in the next 30 years, life will start to become very different from what it is now. By mid-century we will use much less energy; we will live every aspect of our life much closer to home; and we will be much poorer in material terms, because energy and wealth are basically the same thing in an industrial society.

Energy descent — a radical reduction in our use of energy — is certain, but it’s not clear yet which of several factors will cause it to begin. Perhaps we will decide to do the right thing about climate change and reduce our CO2 emissions 80 or 90 percent, which would require changes almost that large in our actual consumption of energy. And there are other ways we might experience a radical reduction in our use of energy; for example, economic collapse, or an expanded war in the middle east. But the factor that makes energy descent a sure thing and sets the theme for this century is "peak oil" — the leveling off of global oil production and then its eventual and inexorable decline.

The timing of the peak is debatable, with forecasts ranging from 2005 (that is, already here) to 2030. But most credible estimates agree with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which concluded in a recent study that "world oil production is at or near its peak," and with the director of research at OPEC, who said recently that "we are at, or near, the production peak of world oil, if not on the downward slope."

After the peak, the growing gap between falling world oil production and ever-increasing global demand will send prices skyward, with economic results that can only be imagined but will certainly include greatly restricted mobility due to the high cost of fuel and much higher prices for most goods, including food. The result will be less disposable income, a life lived closer to home, and a greater reliance on the goods and services that can be provided locally. Since the supply of oil and other fossil fuels is finite, this outcome is guaranteed. The only question is, Shall we plan for what we can see coming, or just let it happen to us?

A group of area citizens, TCLocal, has begun planning now. TCLocal contributors are committed to researching various aspects of energy descent in Tompkins County and writing up a preliminary plan for each aspect based on purely local challenges and resources. This is one such plan.